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  Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780063398122

  Dedication

  For my parents, Charley and Leigh

  and

  in loving memory of my uncle,

  Jay Hale

  1939–2024

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Note to Readers

  Dedication

  1. Sunday, April 29, 2001

  2. Hale Holler

  3. Cave Mountain

  4. Dug Hollow

  5. The Buffalo National River Wilderness

  6. The Third Step to Joyful Living

  7. The Tribulation

  8. The Child Is Not Alive

  9. Anathema

  10. Nothing to Forgive

  11. F.O.U.

  12. You Have Almost Persuaded Me

  13. Trust and Obey

  14. Christ of the Ozarks

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Benjamin Hale

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Sunday, April 29, 2001

  ON SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2001, MY FATHER’S OLDER BROTHER AND his wife, Jay and Joyce Hale, took their granddaughter, Haley Zega—the only child of their only child—on a day trip to the Buffalo National River Wilderness in Newton County, Arkansas, in the heart of the Ozark Mountains. Jay was sixty-two years old at the time, Joyce was fifty-nine, and Haley was six. That morning Jay and Joyce drove their powder blue 1984 Ford F-150 truck from their home in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, to the home of their daughter, Kelly, and her husband, Steve Zega, in Fayetteville, picked up Haley, and drove about an hour and a half to the Hawksbill Crag Trailhead on Cave Mountain, where they met up with their friends and fellow Sierra Club members Claibourne Bass and Dennis and Michelle Boles.

  My uncle Jay and aunt Joyce had been friends with the Boleses—both public schoolteachers—for nearly thirty years, and Jay had been friends with Clay Bass since the two had met in the Cub Scouts when they were in the first grade. Jay and Clay, both engineers, had formed their boyhood bond taking machines apart and putting them back together, building things, destroying things—“Something got blowed up every day,” said Jay. Jay and Joyce owned a mechanical engineering business they ran from their home in Pea Ridge, and Clay Bass owned Highroller Cyclery, a bicycle shop in Fayetteville.

  Jay and Joyce had been married for forty years. They met in 1960: Joyce, an undergraduate studying marketing at the University of Arkansas, bought, with money she had made herself, a tiny plot of land in Fayetteville, and built, with a combination of that same money and her own sweat equity, a tiny two-story house on it; she lived on the first floor and rented the separate-entrance apartment on the second to a graduate student in engineering a few years older than her who had seen an ad for it in the classified section of the Northwest Arkansas Times—her future husband, Jay.

  The visuals of these characters: Jay is a short, stocky man with elfin eyes, silver hair, and a lifelong beard (many Hale men are scientists or engineers with requisite beards; I always feel a little like a soft urban dandy when I am clean shaven); Joyce is tall and willowy, with silver hair that she has kept short since before I started forming memories sometime in the mid-1980s. Whenever I picture them in my mind’s eye, they are both wearing jeans, hiking boots, and plaid flannel shirts, and I’m sure you can with reasonable accuracy imagine the other adults they were with similarly attired. My cousin Haley was a perfectly ordinary—physically, anyway—six-year-old girl with long sandy-blond hair and the very round head and squinty elf eyes that mark our clan, wearing shorts, sneakers, little pink socks, and a baggy gray Cape Canaveral T-shirt. Her mother, Kelly, sent her off that morning with her grandparents with her security blanket and a big red sweatshirt.

  Dennis and Michelle Boles had suggested the outing. Each year in the last weekend of April, the Newton County Wildlife Association would host an easy, guided group hike to see the mountain wildflowers then in full springtime bloom. It was around the last frost, and the Buffalo River valley would be stippled with birdsfoot violets, wild sweet williams, pink azaleas, and early buttercups, the mountain meadow boiling with honeybees and little blue butterflies. Dennis and Michelle joined this hike every year, and that year they invited along Jay and Joyce, who thought it a perfect opportunity for a day trip with their granddaughter. Their daughter, Kelly, had grown up in the woods, on Jay and Joyce’s twenty-five-acre property in Pea Ridge that the family nicknamed Hale Holler, but grown-up Kelly—she was thirty-two that year—worked as an administrator for the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas Orchestra, her husband, Steve, was a criminal defense lawyer and a National Guardsman (he was away on duty at the time), and they lived in the relative comfort and convenience of modern civilization in Fayetteville. Haley had thus far grown up in suburbia, with mown lawn or flat concrete under her feet most of the time she’d spent outdoors in the Natural State.

  Jay and Joyce had always been passionate naturalists, conservationists, environmentalists, and outdoorspeople. Some of my fondest memories of my childhood are of walking in the woods with them in Hale Holler, and one couldn’t have better tutors in all things sylvan. Some people’s souls form beside the ocean, and they don’t feel fully alive unless water comprises at least half the horizon; of the primeval places that haunt and enchant humans, that beckon with beauty and danger, Odysseus and Ishmael head out to sea, but I go with Hansel and Gretel and the rude mechanicals and Dante Alighieri into the woods. In the temperate forests of the Arkansas Ozarks my aunt and uncle had taught me about the plants, the trees, the animals, the weather, the lore, the signs, and the patterns of nature, and they wanted to do the same for Haley. When I was sixteen, I think, Jay gave me a copy of one of the top ten books that changed my life, Edward Abbey’s memoir Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, which has made many people, including me, think seriously about becoming a US park ranger.

  There was also, as there always is for Jay and Joyce, a motive of principle: They wanted their daughter to raise an environmentalist. (That was in the same spirit with which Jay had given me that copy of Desert Solitaire.)

  “We were always looking for an opportunity to take Haley out of her urban life,” Joyce told me. “And since we lived in Pea Ridge in a rural setting, her visits there were always a nice contrast to the life she lived in Fayetteville. There she had all of the wildlife that Kelly had found fun when she was growing up. So having that natural setting was very important to us. We, of course, were active in the environmental movements, and it’s always hard to protect something in the environment if you’ve not had personal experience with it.”

  Dennis and Michelle Boles’s good friend Doc Chester, a retired anesthesiologist, owned about seven acres of land on top of Cave Mountain with a couple of cabins on it; one was a house with all the modern amenities, which Doc lived in, and the other was a more primitive little building called Faddis Cabin that had no door or glass in the windows but that oddly—and as it would turn out, luckily—had a working landline telephone in it. Doc often let his friends use the cabin as a starting point for exploring the Buffalo National River Wilderness. Although they had lived nearby for most of their lives and had hiked other trails on Cave Mountain, Jay and Joyce had never hiked the Hawksbill Crag Trail before, but the Boleses had visited Doc Chester’s property on Cave Mountain many times, and knew the area well.

  The three parties—the Boleses; Clay Bass; Jay, Joyce, and Haley—drove separately up the steep, narrow, rocky dirt road and met up around midmorning at the Hawksbill Crag Trailhead, where the Boleses guided the three-car caravan up the road about seven hundred feet and turned onto the small private road that leads a little over a mile to Doc Chester’s property. As it happened, Doc was home that morning, working in his yard with a chain saw, dismembering a dead tree he had just cut down, and the group chatted with him for a little while before setting off on their hike.

  The plan for the day was to take a short hike from the cabin down to Hawksbill Crag, a famous Arkansas landmark, continue hiking to another vista at the top of a small waterfall, head back to the cabin, eat lunch, then drive not quite thirty minutes down the mountain to meet up with a larger group at the Upper Buffalo Wilderness Trailhead for the Newton County Wildlife Association’s annual wildflower hike. The trek from Doc Chester’s cabin to the waterfall is about nine-tenths of a mile. It was about a quarter after ten when they parked their vehicles at Doc Chester’s cabin. The wildflower hike was set to begin at one in the afternoon.

  I should emphasize the extreme rusticity of the area where Jay and Joyce went hiking with their friends and granddaughter that day. The entire population of Newton County, Arkansas, is only about 7,000. The county is mountainous, mostly wilderness, all of it within the highest elevations of the Ozarks. Its county seat and biggest town is Jasper, which has a population, as of the 2020 census, of 547. There used to be more people living in the Buffalo River valley. The 150-mile-long Buffalo River, one of the few remaining free-flowing rivers in the lower forty-eight United States, originates in the Boston Mo
untains of the Ozark Plateau and flows more or less from west to east through Newton, Searcy, and Marion counties before flowing into the White River in Baxter County, which eventually flows into the Mississippi River, which eventually flows into the Gulf of Mexico. From the Encyclopedia of Arkansas: “With the passage of the Flood Control Act of 1938, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers included the Buffalo River in its planning for a system of dams on the White River. Two potential dam sites eventually were selected on the Buffalo, one on the lower portion of the river near its mouth and one at its middle just upstream from the town of Gilbert (Searcy County).” The hydroelectric potential of the Buffalo River valley had been a distant item of interest on the US Army Corps of Engineers’ to-maybe-one-day-do list for more than twenty years, and the Corps started moving on it in the early 1960s, surveying and drawing up plans. Two opposing organizations formed, one for the proposed dams—the Buffalo River Improvement Association, headed by James Tudor, the owner of a local newspaper, the Marshall Mountain Wave, who had a close working relationship with Third District Congressman James Trimble, who also supported the dams, arguing that the reservoir and hydroelectric plant would bring a lot of new economic activity to the area, which it undoubtedly would have—and another against the dams, the Ozark Society, headed by environmentalist Neil Compton. Several years of political maneuvering and legal fighting ensued, with the anti-dam Compton in one corner and pro-dam Tudor and Trimble in the other, ending with Governor Orval Faubus withdrawing his support for the dams in 1965 and Trimble losing his seat to his anti-dam opponent, John Paul Hammerschmidt, in 1966. The USACE withdrew the dam proposals, and at Compton’s urging, Hammerschmidt, along with Senators William Fulbright and John McClellan, introduced legislation to create the Buffalo National River, which would protect most of the river and about 94,000 acres of land around it under the National Park Service. The legislation passed in 1971, and Nixon signed it into law in 1972.

  It does not appear that the fate of the local residents who lived in the area the proposed reservoir would flood figured much into the considerations of either the pro-dam developers or the anti-dam conservationists. Basically, at first the people who lived in the valley were informed that the government would be building a lake on top of them and they would be forced out of their homes and compelled via eminent domain to sell their properties at probably below-market rates—and then, after years of legal and political squabbling, the great solution the conservationists came up with was to make it all government land, which meant that they had to move, anyway. The prevailing attitude of the people who lived in the valley at the time was: How about the third option, Just leave us the fuck alone? Most of the people who were forced to move did not move very far away; they held on to their resentments and passed them along to their friends, family, and neighbors and down to their children. So there are deep-rooted and long-standing tensions between local residents of the area and the government, which they see as meddlesome, untrustworthy, and incompetent: Keep that in mind for later.

  This story begins on top of Cave Mountain, which is traversable by one very narrow dirt road: Cave Mountain Road, which turns off of Arkansas State Highway 21 just north of a bridge over the Buffalo River, then winds southwest up the mountain and back down the other side to Arkansas State Highway 16. The Hawksbill Crag Trailhead sits at about the highest point on the road. The trail leads from the road into the woods down the mountain a little ways and forks: If you’re coming from the trailhead, the right tine of the fork leads a short distance down to a creek and a small waterfall, where the creek you just hopscotched across spills over the shelf of the bluff and you can stand at the top of the waterfall and take in a magnificent view of the Buffalo River valley; the tine on the left leads along the bluff that peers out over the valley, and from there it’s about half a mile’s hike to Hawksbill Crag, a dramatic arrow of rock jutting into the air two hundred feet above the forest below. This is the thing you have probably come to see, or rather to stand on its vertiginous perch with the majestic view of the valley behind you while your friend takes a picture of you. The view from the top of Hawksbill Crag truly romances the heart with natural beauty, a sight Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt would have liked to paint—or Caspar David Friedrich, who would have put a brave little human figure in the corner of it, gazing into the sublime. I saw it for the first time late in an afternoon in December, when the weather had cleared up a little and let the sunshine in after raining all day, turning the milky mist steaming up from the river valley below a brassy amber, the peaks of the mountains on the other side of the valley islands in the clouds, everything glowing gold.

  If you look it up on AllTrails, the trail officially ends at Hawksbill Crag, aka Whitaker Point, but it actually continues on from there, hugging the crest of the bluff, getting narrower, rockier, and scarier. When I first hiked it in mid-December 2022, there were points along the trail north of Hawksbill Crag that looked so precarious—in a few places you have to walk through small streams over loose, jagged, slippery rocks at the razor’s edge of the cliff—that I thought it safer to bushwhack it off the trail through deep damp leaf mulch a little farther up the mountain, cross the stream at a less deathly place, and bushwhack back down to the trail. I was glad that none of the friends I had grown up hiking Colorado’s mountains with were there to see me, but I felt like less of a coward for detouring around its diciest-looking spots when I later learned of the local notoriety of this trail’s treacherousness—Google “Hawksbill Crag + fall + death,” and you get a sense of its death toll: one every few years, most recently in 2019 and 2016. As it winds north and east along the bluff line, the trail gets thinner and thinner, less and less there, until it peters out beside a tree stump with a metal Private Property/No Trespassing sign nailed to it, and a muddy sheet of laminated paper I found lying facedown in the leaf litter beside it that reads

  NOTICE TO HIKERS

  This trail DEAD ENDS

  at Private Property ahead.

  It DOES NOT loop back to the trailhead!

  In order to return to the trailhead you need to

  turn around and hike back out the same way

  that you came in.

  If you proceed in this direction you will get

  lost, and hike farther than you need to.

  Thanks!

  It’s understandable that someone arriving at that notice might believe the trail loops back to the trailhead, because the map on the trailhead marker indicates that it does. Perhaps it used to. (Note to National Park Service: I understand this probably isn’t high on your priority list, but that map at the Hawksbill Crag Trailhead needs updating.) I picked up the laminated paper sign, wiped some mud off it, pinned it behind the metal sign nailed to the tree stump, and that was as far as I went.

  On that late April Sunday midmorning in 2001, the group of Sierra Club friends did not arrive at Hawksbill Crag as most hikers do, from the direction of the trailhead; they came a back way that the Boleses knew from Doc Chester’s land, which is the private property that sign is warning you not to trespass on. The way from the cabin to the waterfall is only a little less than a mile, which would take an able-bodied adult not stopping perhaps about fifteen to twenty minutes there and fifteen to twenty back, but considering the rocky terrain and the fact that they had a little kid with them—plus they would want to stop and gaze at the beauty at the two vista points—the party reserved about an hour and a half for the day’s first adventure, which they reckoned more than enough time to make the short hike there and back without feeling rushed. Kelly had sent her daughter off that morning with a big red sweatshirt and her security blanket, but as the day had warmed—it was in fact a beautiful spring morning in the Ozarks, sunny and about 70 degrees Fahrenheit with nothing but occasional light cloud cover in the forecast—and they would not be long, they left with light clothing on their bodies and one bottle of water. They left Haley’s blanket and sweatshirt in the truck. They set out from the cabin at about ten thirty in the morning.

  With the Boleses guiding, they hiked south through a flat open field behind the cabin and found the narrow social trail that leads to the Hawksbill Crag Trail. The place where they stepped onto the trail lies within sight of the cabin, about 150 feet from it. This unofficial trail winds around a small pond on Doc Chester’s property and then leads steeply downhill into the woods. “The walk in,” Joyce wrote in her account of the day, “was short and easy to navigate with an interesting variety of things to point out to a child. Shooting stars and pink azaleas were at their height. Tree leaves had not gained their full summer size and allowed the mottled light to filter semi-brightness. Pale spring greens were transitioning into deeper summer hues.”